Top 17 Quotes & Sayings by Anton Webern

Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern, now most often known simply as Anton Webern, was an Austrian composer whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School, which included, among others, Theodor W. Adorno, Heinrich Jalowetz, and Ernst Krenek. Little known in the earlier part of his life, mostly as a conductor with mixed reputation, he came to prominence and increasingly high regard as a composer, teacher, vocal coach, choirmaster, and especially as a conductor mostly during Red Vienna. Webern's work influenced contemporaries Luigi Dallapiccola, Krenek, and importantly even Schoenberg himself. As a tutor, Webern guided and variously influenced Arnold Elston, Frederick Dorian, Matty Niël, Fré Focke, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Philipp Herschkowitz, René Leibowitz, Humphrey Searle, Leopold Spinner, and Stefan Wolpe. Amid Austrofascism, Nazism, and World War II, Webern remained nevertheless committed to taking the "path to the new music," as he styled it in a series of private lectures delivered in 1932–1933 ; and he continued to write some of his most mature and later celebrated music while being increasingly ostracized from official musical life as a "cultural Bolshevist," being reduced to taking occasional copyist jobs from his publisher, Universal Edition, as he lost students and his conducting career.